Dress Sewing

There haven't been many wedding dress muslins around here lately because the plan for the dress has settled down to taking a week of in February to do the bulk of the sewing, and then have it completed by April or March timeframe. Our wedding photographer will take some pictures the nieces & I in our wedding outfits so that we don't have to stress about Ana on the day of the wedding. (As background for new readers of my blog, she's only 4 and she's handicapped, so the wedding day could be very exhausting for her.) I'm really looking forward to hanging a great picture of the three of us in our schmancy dresses in my sewing room, so this seems to be the best way to accomplish that. As a bonus, it forces me to finish all our outfits well before June. I still need to figure out which pattern I'll use by February, but that seems like plenty of time at the moment. ;)

Over the last few weeks I've been helping an old friend plan and make her wedding dress, which has kept me plenty busy with wedding sewing. While we were laying out the skirt pieces on the silk last night we had a few hours to chat about sewing, fabric layouts, grainlines, work (we used to be officemates years ago & have worked at the same companies over the years), wedding nonsense, programming, being oncall for a job, wedding bouquets, old friends, seam allowance sizes, website engineering, and more wedding nonsense. After fiddling with grainlines and layouts on the material for a few hours I left her late last night to mark the stitching lines and cut the fabric. It's been wonderful to see a dress come together, and it's so relaxing to sit around a table and work together. Her wedding is in just a few weeks so she's way ahead of me on the wedding planning and I've been making notes of everything I need to remember when it gets this close to our wedding. Her style is totally different from mine, so her dress is nothing like mine will be. We've had some good laughs over our personal styles affecting the dresses we're making & everything else about the weddings.

Anyway, as if I don't already have enough empire waist gown patterns to select from, I bought two more on etsy recently.

Isn't this one from 1967 just so beautiful? I love the square neckline and the back bow. I've been looking more closely at empire gowns with no gathering where the skirt attaches to the bodice, and this fits that.



Simplicity 7117

And another option:



McCall 9126 (reviews on patternreview)